Cover Image: Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach

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There's a lot of plot here but nothing's happening. The story skips around from life during WWII, women working on the waterfront, disability, gangsters, etc. Unfortunately, none of this was written in a way that interested me. This book was just not for me and I abandoned it. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

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Andrew Smith's review Nov 15, 2017 · edit
really liked it
bookshelves: netgalley

This book tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, born into an Irish family in Brooklyn shortly before the Great Depression. It’s the story of her family too – sister Lydia, mother Agnes and father Eddie – but these other family members flit in and out of the narrative whilst Anna is always present, even when the focus isn't directly upon her.

When Eddie is forced to find a new way of feeding his family – the Depression having seen off his career as a stockbroker – he finds himself becoming a ‘bag man’, delivering mysterious parcels on behalf of a corrupt union official. Eddie often takes Anna with him on these deliveries and the two develop a close bond. She is devoted to her severely disabled sister too, something Eddie finds hard to replicate. Try as he might, he can't help but think what life would have been like had Lydia not been so affected. And through this early part of the book we also learn that Agnes chose to give up her career as a dancer to look after Lydia full-time. Consequently money is very tight. Then things change. We witness Eddie meeting with a local mobster at his Manhattan Beach home. It seems that Eddie might be starting a new job working with him and that this may herald an improvement in their financial state. But very soon Eddie disappears. We're not to learn the detail of his fate for some time.

The first half of the book is quite slow as the narrative develops. First we watch a more grown up Anna working at the shipyard. The nation is at war and she's stuck in a menial job with a group of married women she has little affinity with. But she’s feisty and determined and it isn't long before she sets her sights on becoming a diver. Then we start to learn more about Dexter Styles, the mobster we briefly met earlier. We know Anna and he have met as they had a brief conversation when she attended her father’s meeting with him some years back. Will they meet up again and did he have anything to do with Eddie’s disappearance?

In the second-half the the pace picks up. The timeframe is ever changing as we jump back and forth to monitor current developments and, at last, start to discover what became of Eddie. There are one or two occurrences that challenged my imagination but by and large I found myself launched into a gripping tale that had me turning pages at ever increasing speed.

This book works on a number of levels: as mystery it held me in nervous suspense from the half way point right through to the end; as a commentary on how women and people of colour were treated in mid-century America I found it be be an enlightening and somewhat disturbing account; as a work of literary historical fiction it contained passages of beautiful prose and descriptions of events that had me riveted to the page. But does it all add up to the sum of its parts? For me, not quite. I liked the character development and I felt invested in the fate of all the family members, but the constant changes in time and focus sometimes left me confused and frustrated. Looking back on it, I can see how the structure helped maintain a sense of suspense and it is an interesting way to absorb a tale – but there were times when I just craved a more straightforward approach the unfolding of the plot.

There's lot to enjoy here and I'm sure others will find joy in elements I found frustrating. But there's no doubt in my mind that Jennifer Egan is a talented writer and I, for one, will be seeking out more of her work.

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Anna watched the sea. There was a feeling she had, standing at its edge: an electric mix of attraction and dread. What would be exposed if all the water should suddenly vanish? A landscape of lost objects: sunken ships, hidden treasure, gold and gems and the charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into the storm drain.

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan is a captivating story with all the atmosphere of a noir film set in Brooklyn during the 1930s and beyond. The story orbits three different narratives: Anna, the tough, courageous young daughter of a wayward lackey who ultimately becomes the first female diver to work at the Brooklyn Naval Yard; Anna’s father Eddie Kerrigan as he comes to terms with his other daughter’s debilitating illness and tries to find his place within the organized crime syndicates of New York; and Dexter Styles, a no-nonsense gangster who grapples with the toll his profession takes on his life.

Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper—deeper still—until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.

Anna spends her early years tucked under her father’s wing as he completes various odd jobs for his former union head following the dissolution of the shipping industry at the beginning of The Great Depression. Growing tired of this work and in need of funds to purchase equipment that will improve the life of his other daughter, Lydia, who suffers from a serious, crippling disease, Eddie seeks out the help of Dexter Styles. In his usual manner, Styles requires these initial meets to include the attendee’s family, but ashamed of Lydia, Eddie excuses her and his wife bringing along only Anna. She can sense this meeting is the start of something very important and the image of her father and Styles on the beach near the Styles’ mansion is forever burned into her memory. It is this initial scene that sets the foundation for the remainder of the novel and the various and surprising ways our three narratives intertwine.

She could feel the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips; this came so naturally that she could only think that other people didn’t really try. They always looked, which was as useless when assembling things as studying a picture by touching it.

Years later, Anna is working as a parts inspector for the Brooklyn Naval Yard—forced into the role of breadwinner following her father’s sudden disappearance. Itching to escape the monotony of this tedious job, Anna is one day memorized by the sight of a diver dressing to plunge into the icy depths of the ocean surrounding the Naval Yard. It is in that moment she realizes where her desires lay, having always been mechanically inclined, she sets out to become the first female deep sea diver and boat repair person. However, in the 1940s she is met with an abhorrent amount of prejudice and gender inequality. Ruthless and unwavering, Anna pushes against the boundaries of life, determined to make her dream a reality.

Her photograph was printed in the Brooklyn Eagle, LADY DIVER SHOWS NORMANDIE SALVAGERS BROOKLYN STYLE, the headline read. Anna was smiling in the picture, hatless in her jumpsuit, the wind blowing her hair from clips Within a day of it appearance, the image seemed an artifact from long ago. She kept it beside her bed and looked at it every night before going to sleep. That is the happiest I will ever be, she told herself. Yet she could enjoy that happiness one more day—like waking from a dream of bliss and being allowed, briefly, to resume it.

Meanwhile, still tormented by the loss of her father—her companion—Anna begins to search for answers, trudging up a memory that niggles in that back of her mind: Styles and her father together on the beach. In an underground dance club, Anna is reunited with Styles—though he does not recognize this young women before him—and together they embark on a journey through which each find what they are looking for, as heartbreaking as it may be.

Masterfully executed, the history of 1930s New York is brought back to life through Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. Brooding yet exciting, illusory yet grounded, the story of Anna, Eddie and Dexter will transport you to the sandy, briny shore of the Port of New York and all the history therein

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A special thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Egan's latest offering takes place in America during the Depression. Twelve-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who she perceives to be important. Anna can't help but notice the lavish house equipped with servants, toys for the children, and the pact between Styles and her father.

Years later the country is at war, Anna's father has disappeared, and she has to support her mother and disabled sister with work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Because of the war, women are allowed to work and perform jobs that were traditionally jobs for men. She becomes the first female diver—an incredibly dangerous occupation—repairing naval ships. Anna meets Dexter Styles at a nightclub and realizes that he is the man she visited with her father before his disappearance. Styles has ties to the mob and Anna begins to understand the complexity of her father's life.

The first section is smart, sharp, and brilliantly executed. Egan's writing is solid, exactly what you would expect. Then the novel makes one of many jumps in time and the story becomes scattered. There is a complete lack of harmony and the reader is left with a rambling narrative that is a mash-up of three stories. Hinging on boring at times, I didn't connect with the characters, or the plot, and this is disappointing because Egan has obviously done her homework.

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This felt a bit more driven by characters than plot but it was interesting the way all of their stories were woven together. She could have built more suspense by holding back some of the story until later but that doesn't seem to have been an important factor. I really liked this. I cared about the characters and she put them in an interesting point in history.

This review is in exchange for a free e-galley from netgalley.com.

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There was so much I enjoyed about Manhattan Beach and a few things I wished were different
Pros:
Wartime NYC - the time and place were told beautifully
The Mafia - who doesn’t love a mobster, just wish there was more of that story
Women entering the workforce - girl power!
One great love scene (I’m not a huge fan of sex scenes but this one was written perfectly, and I appreciate that there was only one)
Cons
Merchant Marines- every scene with Eddie I wanted to cut out from the story... just plain boring.
Diving - in the beginning it was interesting but Egan went too far with describing everything making that story less about how a woman can do anything to a lesson in old school diving which I found boring, and there was a lot of it.

The pros outweigh the cons and I did enjoy this one, especially the first half of the book. I would recommend it to friends who enjoy historical fiction and who don’t mind a slow moving book.

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Manhattan Beach is a tale of two stories. On one side, there is Anna's work life and struggles to find her role in the wartime economy. On the other side, there is Anna's private life with her missing father and handicapped sister. Even though the two stories barely coincide, except for one key scene towards the end that sets the finale into motion, both are interesting from the glimpses into wartime New York they provide.

Manhattan Beach is by no means an action-filled story. In fact, the biggest complaint about the novel from others is that it moves slowly. To me, it is a character-driven story, and the slow pacing works as Ms. Egan affords readers the opportunity to intimately understand Anna, her motivations, her passions, and her schedule. At the same time, it allows readers to learn about wartime New York and what women experienced as they went to work in roles previously held by men. We see how the gangsters transitioned from the Prohibition era to the wartime, how things changed for everyone in any role, and watch as society evolves.

This historical aspect of the story is by far its strongest one. Particularly interesting was Anna's struggles to become a deep-sea diver. History books and wartime anecdotes would have you believe that industries, particularly those involving manual labor, welcomed women with open arms to fill the voids left by the men going overseas to fight. Ms. Egan shows that this is not true. The hatred Anna faces as well as the scorn, doubt, and general prejudice she experiences just to be able to put on the diving suit is disturbing. Yet, on some levels, the misogyny surrounding her decision to dive is not surprising in the least. While it is nice to think that Rosie the Riveter, and the women who answered the call of that advertisement, faced no issues, we just have to look to today's society to realize the likelihood of that having actually happened is nil. Anna's story in that regard is just one more in a long line of gender bias and prejudice women continue to experience today.

The second part of Anna's story, that of her personal life, also provides historical context that educates and intrigues. As with the idealized impression of women in blue-collar manual labor roles, I never thought that the idea of a single woman living alone in the 1940s was scandalous behavior. After all, there have been women-only boarding houses in existence for decades by this point in history. In my mind, the same would seem to hold true with going out without a chaperone. However, Anna's experiences burst this idyllic bubble of mine just as it did with Rosie the Riveter. Yet, while society may still see women as fragile and in need of protection, Anna's story shows how the war slowly changes this attitude. Ms. Egan, through Anna, provides a clearer picture of just what it meant to be an unmarried woman during World War II.

Even though the story revolves around Anna, Ms. Egan uses multiple viewpoints to round out her story. These character point-of-views fill in the gaps that Anna will never learn and help answer mysteries to which Anna will never obtain the answers. While Ms. Egan could have told the story strictly through Anna's eyes, the multiple perspectives afford the reader the opportunity to garner the whole truth, particularly around Anna's missing father, while allowing Anna to remain ignorant of the truth, something that feels essential to her character. In essence, they leave readers with no unanswered questions and better insight to what was occurring behind Anna's back while remaining true to all of the characters and the story.

While I enjoyed reading Manhattan Beach, finding it intriguing and educational, I can see why others are struggling to finish it. It is not a complicated plot, and there is very little action. Without the historical context, it would indeed be boring; if the history doesn't interest you, then it is boring. Nothing is much of a surprise, and while we get to know Anna very well, she does not develop much as a character. For me, the history and the mystery of the father's disappearance, no matter how predictable, were enough to overshadow the predictability and to pique my interest. Whether it will be enough for you is up to your individual tastes in stories.

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Starts pre-WWII but the books spends most of it's time in set in WWII New York harbor. Anna is the daughter of a Mafia bagman and a former show girl. She has a disable sister that her Mother dotes on. Anna is working measuring pieces of ships but really wants to be a diver. The book tries to fit a lot in and some of it was weird. I found it interesting in parts but did not enjoy it.

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I liked this book, my first by Jennifer Egan, because it captured a very interesting period of time in New York. It was well researched and I learned a good deal about women working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during WWII and the challenges of women in the workforce. It also dealt with the slow pace of desegregation during this time period.

There were several stories interwoven including that of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman whose adored father, Eddie, has disappeared and Dexter Styles, an underworld figure who Eddie worked for prior to his disappearance. There are many other characters and plot lines as we eventually find out what happened to Eddie.

While the writing is good and the story held my interest, I found some of the connections and twists of plot less believable and the actions of the characters implausible. The ending seemed to lack closure on a number of issues.

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I was so looking forward to reading this book. I did not finish Manhattan Beach. I couldn't connect to any of the characters and the story felt flat.

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It kind of feels like parts of the book are missing. There are some abrupt jumps in the book that feel like the author wants us to make a leap of some sort because she didn't feel like writing it. With that kind of writing, as interesting as I found the book, it was hard to get sucked in.

Anna as a character was feisty and determined, and was honestly someone to root for. However, the previously mentioned jumping made it difficult to really get invested in her as a character.

The other characters all work well within the story, but are less fleshed out. To the detriment of the book.

I feel like this is the bare bones structure of a better book, and that's kind of disappointing.

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Unfortunately this one didn’t do it for me which was unexpected since it has been getting so much attention. I felt the characters were all over the place and I couldn’t become connected to this book

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A thoroughly engrossing, meticulously researched, and engaging novel of love, fear, hope, and relationships in a dramatic time of American history. The characters are lifelike, the writing craft is brilliant, and the story will have you wrapped up in it. Gorgeously done.

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A girl, living in Brooklyn, a deep loving attachment to her father....this isn't A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but....close enough. This is an epic in scope and in story. The story of fathers and daughters, the Great Depression, women in the workforce and the story of so, so many families.

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I didn't like this novel. Yes, I went straight to the point: this novel just wasn't for me. It started off interestingly enough, introducing us to young Anna whom I really liked. However, that went away pretty quickly and then I had to make myself get through this overly long and boring story. Even though this novel is pretty much all about plot, it was still extremely slow. I literally had to force myself to get through it because it just felt like nothing was really happening. I was also quite confused with the direction the author was taking. Is it about being the first female working as a diver? Is it about gangsters? I still don't know. I also felt like the author treated the characters as expendable; they were there one minute, gone the next, and would just reappear again to "conveniently" serve some mundane purpose before dying or going away. That bothered me to no end. In the end, this novel just had too many flaws for me to enjoy it. The highest I'm giving this novel is a 1/5 stars.

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I received this from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

I couldn't get a grasp on this story. It seemed to wander here and there and frankly, I just got bored.

Abandoned at 25%.
DNF, no rating

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A strong attachment to her father leads Anna to search for him, wondering about a secret life she slowly uncovers as she enquires years after his sudden absence ... what went wrong? The death of a damaged sister, and a mother stymied and stalled at home during the world war they all seek to fight in their own ways, and a free-spirited aunt, lean on her in ways she does not even appreciate. We've met the man who probably orchestrated what was supposed to be her father's death - and he becomes very close to Anna as he perceives her quest. Having readher earlier works - especially The Keep- i was not as surprised that following her most recent novel, winner of prizes, A Visit from the Goon Squad, she might have reverted to a more conventional form, exept there are time re-sequencing, flashbacks, that are not consecutive unto themselves. Anna is slightly a cold fish, but curious about things which draws us in. Very thoroughly detailed in historical detail in a satisfying way, a dense meaty novel that i'm glad to have read.

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I'll start off by saying that is you came to this book by way of "A Visit From the Goon Squad," this is a very different book, and if you want more of that you might be disappointed. But if you're down for some historical fiction featuring solid prose, a haunting atmosphere and a storyline with just enough mystery to keep you going, then pick this up.

The plot follows the fates of three people: Eddie Kerrigan, his daughter Anna and the crooked nightclub owner Dexter Styles. The three of them meet in the very first chapter and after that are never all in the same place again, but each leaves a shadow that follows the others in one way or another. The central figure is Anna, who is a little girl at the beginning. We follow her life through World War II and beyond as she tries to make a living as a female diver, haunted by the absence of her father, who disappeared years before. When she happens to run into Dexter Styles, she thinks she might finally get some answers.

The thing that made me chop off one star was the book's multiple points of view. Anna is by far the most compelling character. When the perspective shifts from her to Dexter, the momentum dies. After the first such shift, I found it difficult to pick up the book and continue to read Dexter's POV and even in the end, I felt I could easily have done without it.

Eddie's POV covers parts of the story you couldn't get any other way, but it felt wedged in. As if Egan had wanted to include things she had learned about seamanship and the war, but hadn't any other way to include them than to give Eddie a side adventure. Eddie's chapters were not a bad read, but I couldn't help but feel that there was more to be explored in Anna's experience--I would have loved for her to have Anna get more insight into what Charlie Voss's life outside of work was like, for example--and I wasn't really sure what was the point of the happenings in his chapters, except to surround his flashbacks.

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Wow! I just wrote "historical fiction" for a book in which much of the plot happened during my lifetime. That was a rude awakening!

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan is a New York story, but not the kind of New York story that we are used to reading. It is an extremely well-researched novel based at the harbor and navy yard in Brooklyn in the 1930s and then, again, during World War II. (Just for clarification sake, I wasn't alive during the 1930s, but I was born during WW II.)

There are three main characters, with others on the periphery. The primary character, Anna Kerrigan grows up during this time frame. Her father, Ed Kerrigan, appears, disappears, and then reappears in her life. Dexter Sykes, a wealthy nightclub owner with mob connections, plays a pivotal role in the Kerrigans' lives. They all appear together in book's the first scene, on a wintery day on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn when Anna is 11 and her father has business with Sykes. While other characters have influence in the plot, the book is not about them. Although you don't connect the dots right away, the pivotal scenes happen in Dexter Sykes boathouse at his beachfront home on Manhattan Beach.

Anna grows up before our eyes. As happened to many young women coming of age during the war years, she gets an industrial job at the boatyard. She counts and packages parts for the warships that are being constructed at the naval yard, but what she really wants to do is to be a naval diver. Through the help of her boss, she has a successful tryout with a diving company, and because many of the former divers have joined the navy, she gets a job working underwater on ships being repaired.
She finds her identity in her work, and Egan emphasizes how all the characters' identities are wrapped up in their work. We understand this, because for many, if not most, of us, our identities are our work. Much of the narrative focuses on the work, and we learn in detail the work of the diver, including all the mechanisms that go into the 1940's diving outfit.

Family relationships are relatively meaningless to the plot of Manhattan Beach. Family members wander in and out of the plotline, because family is not the story that Egan wants to tell. Ed Kerrigan's reaction to his multiply-handicapped younger daughter is extremely complicated, and he can't deal with his emotional reaction to her. When the daughter dies, Anna's mother leaves Anna on her own in the city and moves back to her family in Minnesota. When her mother leaves, she thinks of Anna: "It was hard to imagine her lonely; she was so self-contained." She hugs her fiercely "trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed." Dexter Sykes barely knows his wife and children, so caught up he is with his work. Anna's aunt, a minor character, returns to prominence in Anna's life at the end of the novel as Anna deftly solves the major secret in her life.

Another prominent aspect of the novel concerns the secrets that people keep. More than once, a character says to another: "We will never speak of this again." Here is another example of text about keeping secrets. Anna is thinking of her work friend Nell. "Nell was not a good girl. Her secrets weren't for Anna to know, and this made her feel easy in Nell's presence—released from a scaffolding of pretense she'd been unaware of maintaining with other girls." We also realize that it is the secrets we keep that hold us back, and only when we release the secret are we able to move forward. Anna's secret is potentially devastating and crippling, but she and her aunt solve it in a forward-moving, life affirming way.


The sea is central to everything that happens in the novel—from Anna's career as a diver, her father's second career as a seaman, to Dexter Sykes' boathouse. "Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from 'keeled over' to 'learning the ropes' to 'catching the drift' to 'freeloader' to 'gripe' to 'brace up' to 'taken aback' to 'leeway' to 'low profile' to 'the bitter end' or the very last link on a chain." The naval yards and the bars and restaurants that surround the docks are areas that we have seen in novels of other cities, but seldom seen in a novel about New York. At the end of the book, Egan discusses her research and the amount of time she spent learning about the war, boats, naval yards, and diving. It is impressive.

Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for her quirky and innovative novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I adored, but I was not expecting to read a similar novel when I picked up Manhattan Beach. because I had read that she had returned to a more conventional novel format. At the same time, I can report that the novel is powerful and effective, a classic in structure and subject. Both reviews in the New York Times are immensely complementary. One reviewer called it "a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone." He calls Egan a "witty and sophisticated writer." A review was also on the front page of the Times Book Review. That reviewer says that "this is a novel that deserves to join the canon of New York stories."

I also read a great Egan interview in The Wall Street Journal. Here's what I love the most about this novel. By returning to a classic genre, Jennifer Egan has again been innovative. What will she do next?

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A richly detailed story about fathers and daughters, a disabled sister, mobsters, the merchant marines and a female diver. Egan' s research is evident and she brings the diving scenes to life. The main character of Anna will appeal to most readers. Secondary characters are well developed and the sense of place is wondrous be it New York or San Francisco.

Copy provided by the Publisher and NetGalley

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